As Rational and Linear As An Algebra Equation(1992)
“I’ve been waiting, anticipating
sun comes up
the skies wont sink my soul
I’ve dreamt of this
but it never comes
but it never comes”
Pavement-Slanted And Enchanted

It was back then I suppose
cuz I was listening to this album all the time
It was a happy album and summer babe was so warm.
Maybe it served as a little romance novel amid all the other
stuff going on. The music was so comfortable i never
knew where is was going but it resolved its’ into something,
it had an end. It brought up the Velvet Underground of
John Cale monologues but it was so much easier feel.
It was A kinda happy place I suppose.
I was living a couple doors down from my mother In the
basement of a huge 19030s apartment building
on what the called “Pill Hill” had a lot of hospitals
on it and which overlooked downtown Seattle
and sat right next to the Broadway area.

I Lived with a little chubby Korean girl named Sihyon.
We talked baby talk together most of the time. I Worked as a CNA
or Certified Nursing Assistant in a really fancy facility on the Seattle
University Campus.
We spent most of the money we had on expensive food
from a high end Grocery called Larry’s. Most of the food
I ate went down the toilet but I was still nice and fat and
she was large enough that when we went shopping she would only
want to buy shoes. She went to Tacoma every weekend
to see her parents who knew nothing of me. I got a differential
for working weekends so I would buy alcohol and drink myself into
passing out. At that point I don’t remember doing anything else.
During the week I was able to get enough money to buy forty ounce bottles
of malt liquor which I used to drink to pass out after work in the morning.
Of course I rotated stores even though I walked around in really crappy
clothes and was obviously a drunk of sorts I did have my pride.
The friend who gave me the tape of the pavement
album(all our vinyl was played once and taped) lived on Bainbridge island where I had gone to highschool.
He was so lucky cuz his parents must have thought of him a insane yet
harmless so they let him stay in their home. He was pretty responsible actually.
We both knew deep down we were never going to make it as regular people.
But I guess we also had to harbor some delusion that it would all change someday
and we would become responsible upper middle class people of taste. I mean we
knew what was fashionable. We new they didn’t sell it and you had to find it
and it didn’t matter. And to act truly snotty you just dressed like a bum and
lived in a really rich part of town. So we ended up better then all the people
around us because we thought they were rich and stupid and we never had
to see actual poor people who would have just be boring because they didn’t
have any musical taste. We had that taste in spades.
Pavement was right at the end of that cycle for me. Soon I would sell my record collection
for pot, get a degree in biochemistry at and not work again for another 7 years.

For some reason I went a bit off the deep end about the whole new camera thing. I had a blog that got 17,797 hits and I just went off to the great big consumer heaven on earth. I almost completely believed I that I could not live without a new camera, that my art demanded a new camera that said camera would change art as we know it and it was really cheap? (3,700 bucks with lens) and it was undoubtedly the best.

Here I am again. It’s 11:58 and I’m alone. I’m listening to some John ColtraneMiles davis collaboration I downloaded. I never listen to jazz—hell I really don’t listen to music much anymore-well shit that Coltrane is becoming to foreground—I’ll just switch to Eno‘s “Music for airports“.

Life is just one long distraction. I listen to this and I watch that and I sit araound and look at pictures. Where am I. I get the greatest joy out of watching cartoons-well the easiest joy– I sure laugh A lot. Strange how I came close to ending up in prison a few days ago when I drank all that vodka. The next day I found this little eensy piece of a Bud from one of those plants. I smoked it at night for a few days. Boy did that rid me of my of my anhedonia but shit I wish I were in Massachusetts or California or Alaska..

Did you know that marijauna works on a whole different neurochenmical basis then alcohol or narcotics or antideppressant or really anything. We humans actually have endocannabinoids in our brains. Not much is really known about the whole thing.

It’s always struck me as strange that we can have the genome of the human and the rat and god knows what all else and it hasn’t really led to anything as far as new drugs. There hasn’t been a new antidepressant in years. All the “new” ones are just drug companies attempts at reselling their recently off-patent drugs as new ones mainly by making them extended release which has never seemed to make them any better in my experience -in fact they are worse. But where are all the new breakthroughs. I guess when you look back at the history of science it turn out it isn’t something that corporations do very well. The most important thing is for scientists to communicate with each other and that is just totally ruined in a capitalist environment. Lots of money used to be spent on basic research at the universities but it seems that the companies have even taken that over.

I wonder how people can expect a company to do anything other than make money. Everything that a company does is to that end or should be. Their products don’t exist to serve the function they are used for they exist to make money. Science doesn’t necessarily make money and to have a company that exist to make money make drugs for people is dangerously insane. It’s essentially giving a drug pusher a monopoly on whatever they can find that will sell.

You might think that the Double-blind studies prove the effectiveness of the drugs they test but even that is debatable especially when the measure is some psychological test. All the soft sciences like psychology or sociology are extremely prone to influence from money and culture and law and opinion. God I depress myself when I think like this but I always think like this. I accept these opinions as reflecting what is really going on in the world so I’m stuck with them. But I can go beyond it I suppose sometime sometime sometimes

Course your right Elin it’s just I’ve been listening to a whole bunch of Sinclair Lewis lately.

Live and let live sure I agree.

But I was listening to this Lecture series about twentieth century American literature and the professor had this really stupid set of books picked out so it didn’t look promising to me. Once I started listening he explained his reasoning. He was picking out books under the assumption that american literature was uniquely about individuality and being true to oneself. Therefore he had Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and so that kinda makes sense until you actually think about what individuality is. If one cannot extract the parts of ones personality that are culturally conditioned then you cannot truly be yourself. Sinclair Lewis pounds home repeatedly the hypocrisy and self misunderstanding that stems fron growing up in a sick and twisted culture. Hemingway, FitzGerald and Kerouac a good examples of writers and humans who were unable to extract themselves from their culture and ended up letting the culture Kill them. But then Sinclair Lewis died of advanced alcoholism just like Kerouac but at least he wasn’t living with his mother he was in Europe.

Today who knows what happened. It just happened without much will from me. Some days I don’t care. I keep thinking “well at least I’m not my dad who wasted so much of his life and just reads a bunch of crappy master and commander novels” but then there is books again. I’m thinking and thinking and thinking some more. I don’t want to waste the time I have doing boring and pointless things. I’m here now I can do whatever the hell I want and I don’t want to waste it. But this worlds is filled with so many shallow vapid rigid idiots. Or smart people with something to prove who use there head like some Lothario uses his dick. I’m fucking bored. None of my photo’s are turning out right today.
This afternoon I reached a point of pure apathy and I had the right book sitting on my hard drive for times like that. I started listening to Waiting for Godot and its all there, fuck I didn’t even really need to listen to it. But back of my mind I need a project to dedicate myself to. Not just taking photographs because that doesn’t change things. I want a project that changes the project. I want ever-changing vistas to appear everyday. I was sitting in the dairy queen today and I thought how lucky I was to spend so much time in self directed activity. It’s led me to a place where the dairy Queen seems like some alien world. It’s like going through some virtual reality. I listen to the songs on the radio and I think about just what they mean I mean what the really mean and I look at all the different ways matter has been manipulated by human being to create all the objects every place i look. I can see the coercion in the process and the intent and the purpose of all the objects and then on top of that there is the pure form and color they possess. It’s just so interesting to think about a sign and what went in to make it and why it’s there. The tired modes of thought and and actions people take are so insane looked at in this way. People just seem to do as close to the same thing everyday as they can. People are driven by so many forces outside themselves to do so many things that they would have never freely chosen to do. But then it’s a short hop from the apathy I felt listening to “Godot” and utter hopelessness.
It’s like I just want to go up to people and shake them and scream “what the hell are you doing? Why? Why do you give me such lame excuses for existing? why do you spend your lives following other people around. Are you even alive?”
I haven’t done that yet.😉

How can I continue on
I keep hoping I’ll somehow
find some marijuana
but then i know that might
not be so good

I feel like now that I have my medication
I should be alright

but I had a tooth pulled
it makes me feel so mortal
so goddamn useless

I don’t know what I could ever want now
A new camera
maybe

When I was a kid things could make me happy

now I am in a zone or on a plane

A plain that stretches out everywhere to nothing

I feel like the pointless shoes I the film Gerry
they just blithely go around in a daze
lost but unable to really be serious
and Instead of going through some melodramatic death scenes
where they remember their past or dread their future
they just stop talking and it’s over

They just stop talking
and that’s supposed to mean something
people are supposed to be able to be happy
people are supposed to want things
aren’t they

I can’t believe there is no father or mother out there
for all of us to find
some loving presence that will make everything ok finally

someone to apologize to
someone who knows more

But that just isn’t the case is it
there is nothing out there

I almost want to pick up a Bukowski book
just to see how it is to never hope
or see if I am missing something
but there doesn’t seem to be anyone
or anything that is out there to save me

and there is but one to hug me
another me
another one for death to cure

No roaring fires
no shelter from the storm
just endlessly slippery concepts
of loss and grief and
REGRET

It was all for nothing
right?
and I’m just to afraid
to do anything about it

I have become my own god and no one
can say a goddamn thing to me

know one can trump my knowledge
because I ahve thought of or dismissed
every idea
every way out

I wish I were a heroin addict
that would get me in shape
I’d get A nice routine going

I could sleep in comfort till I died

but this isn’t going to happen
nothing ever happens
things are just done